Bots are cheap and effective. One startup trolls them into going away

Bots are ruining the internet.

When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.

Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t [...]

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February 5, 2019

Bots are cheap and effective. One startup trolls them into going away

Bots are ruining the internet.

When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.

Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t [...]

Read More

January 29, 2019

Google’s Jigsaw is giving European politicians free DDoS protection

Political organizations in Europe can now get free protection from web flooding attacks from Google’s cybersecurity incubator Jigsaw. For the first time, European operators will be able to use Project Shield, a tool that helps protect political opera…

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December 20, 2018

FBI shuts down 15 DDoS-for-hire sites

Federal law enforcement appears determined to prevent the distributed denial of service attacks that have ruined the holidays of gamers (and others) in the past. The FBI has seized the domains of 15 DDoS-for-hire services, including relatively well-…